Software engineer in Manchester, UK. I build production web and mobile systems and go as deep as the problem needs: a Rust ledger, a C++ DLL hooking a game engine's file API, an AI assistant that runs on WhatsApp, motion graphics rendered from the same components as the app. For the last year that has meant founding and shipping a payments network.

Most recently, Spondula: a global payments network where your S-Handle is your payment identity, the payment equivalent of a username. Live in beta since June 2026, on the App Store and Google Play. A TypeScript web wallet and gateway, a Kotlin and Compose Android app, a SwiftUI iOS app, and a Rust core underneath. The signing code both apps depend on is one Rust crate exposed to Swift and Kotlin, because a wallet that signs payments on two platforms should have one implementation of the maths, not two. Before that, a small studio shipping web products for clients.

The habit that runs through most of what I build: when a fix fails twice, stop guessing and get evidence. An animation that would not settle was recorded frame by frame from the simulator until the broken transition was visible. The key derivation has a golden vector pinned at three layers, Rust, the FFI boundary and the iOS test, so a platform port cannot drift. Every large change gets an adversarial review from a second, independent reviewer before it merges.

Currently looking for my next role: full-stack, mobile or product engineering, on a team that ships. Available now. Remote UK, or hybrid and on site anywhere I can reach from Manchester. wael@thedigitalsandbox.co.uk

Spondula: send to any S-Handle instead of account numbers, sort codes, IBANs or wallet addresses. Transfers between S-Handles on the Spondula network are free. Nine repos: the web wallet, the gateway, the admin console, a merchant gateway, the status page, an article studio, the iOS app, the Android app and the ledger. Plus a motion kit in Remotion whose compositions are prop-driven templates, so a corridor teaser is rendered from data rather than re-edited.

The Digital Sandbox (private, live at thedigitalsandbox.co.uk): a customer-messaging platform for small businesses. Embeddable chat widget, campaigns and flows, Meta integrations for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and a React Native companion app. Next.js, deployed on Google Cloud.

Autotube (private): a multi-tenant short-video generator. Brand configuration drives the Remotion compositions, so one video engine serves every tenant with their own fonts, colours and presenter overlays. Tenant-scoped data rules, a render job queue, and a generic reel composition fed by scene data.

DigiSkale (private, team project): a Flutter social app on Firebase, posts, stories, follows and notifications. My part is the posting and profile features and the data rules behind them.

Fincore: design prototype for a fintech app that reads your Big Five personality profile and reframes spending decisions through it. 38 screens in Next.js and an Expo twin. The splash is rendered to video by Remotion from the same component that draws it in the app, so the two can never disagree.

token-gating-admin: per-product token gating for a storefront. Contract address, token ID and chain, resolved live to the collection, with a shopper preview of what a holder and a non-holder each see. Vite, React, TypeScript, Tailwind v4.

Thursday (private): a personal chief of staff that answers on WhatsApp and email from a memory it maintains itself. A Node server with a React ops deck, a headless CLI runner for the model with per-thread session continuity, and nightly routines that walk the day's session captures into atoms, reconcile duplicate entities, and link and abstract the notes into a graph. Morning brief, end-of-day review and an obligation ledger on top.

vault-brain: Thursday's memory pipeline released on its own. Three nightly stages over a markdown vault: walk session captures into typed atoms on entity notes, reconcile duplicate entities and repoint every wikilink, then type the relationships between notes and promote well-connected ones into insight hubs. Ledgers make every stage idempotent, a budget governor can skip a night, and the model is any command that reads a prompt on stdin. No dependencies, 51 tests.

sr25519-uniffi: one Rust crate for BIP39 mnemonics, sr25519 key derivation, signing, verification and SS58 addresses, exposed to Swift and Kotlin through UniFFI so an iOS app and an Android app share one implementation of the maths instead of two ports that drift. The golden vector is pinned at three layers and the signature path is cross-checked against the reference JavaScript implementation in both directions.

Hermes Mobile (private): a platform adapter and Android app that make a phone a first-class channel for an open-source agent framework. Python plugin, push notifications, and speech synthesised on send so replies arrive as audio. Kotlin and Compose chat console. 43 plugin tests and 20 app tests.

Pixel Agents fork (private): a fork of a VS Code extension that draws running coding agents as pixel characters in an office. Added a tower view that stacks workspaces as floors, tool-name pills above subagents, and a sticky fade on stop so short-lived agents are visible at all.

crimson-desert-got-dragon-mod: reverse engineering an undocumented skinned-mesh format. The engine does not store 3D positions at all; the vertex shader reconstructs them from quantised bytes and a per-submesh bounding box, found by tracing a draw in PIX and reading the DXIL. A codec that decodes and re-encodes the format, patchers that redirect assets without touching game files, and CPU replays of the shader stages checked against the capture. The C++ loader DLL that hooks the game's file API lives in a separate repo.

BD-1 (in progress): a desk-scale walking companion droid. Twelve bus servos, five per leg plus head pan and tilt, one IMU, printed PETG spars on bought metal brackets, with the fan-made shell used as cladding only. Walking chosen over wheels on purpose, because the character is the point. Radio control first, voice later.

TypeScript · Next.js · React · Kotlin · Jetpack Compose · Swift · SwiftUI · Rust · UniFFI · Firebase · Google Cloud · Playwright · GitHub Actions · Remotion · After Effects